Can Fukunaga pull off his version of Heat?
Genre: Period/Crime
Premise: Set in the dirty streets of Manhattan circa 1977, a summer when a serial killer known as the Son of Sam was terrorizing the city, a group of cops try and rob the three biggest gangsters in the city, all in one blackout-filled night.
About: This was a hot package that sold at Cannes this year. It’s got James Bond director Cary Fukunaga directing from a script he rewrote. It also has Tom Hardy and Mahershala Ali in the lead roles.
Writer: Cary Joji Fukunaga (based on script by Frank John Hughes)
Details: 127 pages
What do I always say?
Everyone who gets into this screenwriting racket is doing so for one reason and one reason only – to rewrite their favorite movies.
Fukunaga wants to make his “Heat.”
How did he do??
It’s 1977, New York City, a notoriously scorching year in The Big Apple. Like a Global Warming preview. That Son of Sam guy is out there killing women left and right. Hey, it could be worse. Could be Game of Thrones and he’s killing kids.
Our story focuses on best friend cop partners Ray Butler and Eddie Boyle. Ray is a recovering alcoholic who is weeks away from finishing his self-imposed 6-month sober goal which will allow him to move back in with his wife and daughter. For the first time in a long time, Ray is back on the straight-and-narrow.
Irish cop Boyle has a kid of his own coming soon. But, unlike Ray, he’s not afraid to spice it up now and then, mostly through taking bribes. Hey, it was the 70s! Bribing was a thing back then.
The problem is, New York is falling apart. This super hot summer has led to a boiling point with the people in charge. In a week, they’re going to indict every dirty cop in the city. And both Boyle and Ray are on that list. Their careers are effectively over after that.
So Boyle’s got an idea for while they’re still cops. Steal from the three biggest crime names in the city, all in one night. Sammy Yin’s gambling parlor. Mob boss Carmine Galante’s safe house behind his pizza joint. And drug lord Nicky Barnes’ money pickup van.
Their plan is simple. Ray, Boyle, and three other guys are going to walk in with their faces covered but their badges up, which will cause all of the bad guys to freeze, and they’ll take the money without any pushback. That’s the PLAN mind you.
They head out early in the night to begin the robberies and that’s when THE ENTIRE CITY EXPERIENCES A BLACKOUT. Half of the guys want to bail but Boyle thinks it’s a sign from God. Tonight was supposed to happen. So… away they go!
The first question I want to ask you guys is: Is this a good hook for a movie?
The blackout thing.
My take on hooks is that they should introduce something clever into the story – something that, when you hear it, you get goosebumps. Take Back to the Future for example. If it’s “A high school kid accidentally takes a time machine to the past and has to find a way back again,” there’s no real hook to that.
The hook is that he disrupts his mom and dad’s meeting, making his mom fall in love with him rather than his father, threatening his very existence. He now has to convince his dorky dad to grow some balls and get his mom back, all before it’s time to go home. That’s the clever part.
When the big hook hit in this script – the blackout – I wasn’t sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing. That indicates it’s not clever. Does darkness help with cover? Does it mean that the targets are all going to be easier to access? I was at a loss.
Now, once we see the crime on the streets start rising… then I understood the blackout thing better. This is going to make things difficult for them. Which is good! That’s what you want to do to your characters. You always want to make things harder for them.
But let’s back up for a second. Because today’s script, ironically, had a similar problem to yesterday’s House of the Dragon season premiere. Setup. Lots and lots of setup.
How much setup?
Let’s put it this way. We don’t even discuss the 3-Ring Robbery until page 50! Normally, you want to hit that around page 15. At the latest, page 30 (end of the first Act for a 120 page script).
But this script had 30 characters it needed to set up. When you have that many characters, it takes time. Let this be a warning to all of you with high character counts. It takes time to set up all those characters. And unless you’re a master at setting up characters, whereby every one of them is set up in some entertaining way, then most of those character intros are going to feel like setup (aka, boring). They’re not going to be entertaining for us to read or watch.
Which is a shame because I think this could be a good movie if they got everything moving along quicker.
It is said that the error of the spec writer is that he moves everything along too fast – because he’s trying to keep bored readers from closing his script. But the error of the writer whose feature is being made, like this one, is that he moves everything along too slowly.
Why keep the plot moving when you know people are stuck in the theater watching it regardless of whether the story’s fast or not? Also, there’s hubris when you’re talking about a writer-director with Fukunaga’s success. You start to believe your shit smells like Lysol and you don’t think you’re beholden to the classic rules of storytelling. “I’m going to take my time because I’m a genius.”
That gets you in trouble every single time. Never underestimate how quickly audiences can get bored. And Fukunaga is testing that with his, ‘wait until page 50 for the inciting incident’ gamble.
Things DO get exciting after that point. We’re building suspense before the big night. So we’re invested then. And, of course, the 3-pronged robbery itself is fun. The question is, will people mentally check out before that arrives?
Fukunaga would probably say, “You know what Carson? F&^k off. I’m making a cool movie here.” Which I get. This *IS* a cool movie. And he’s obviously tapping into the way movies used to be made. This is a 70s/90s crime action cop thriller. It’s going to look really cool.
I just get annoyed when writers inflate their first acts to ridiculous sizes because they’re shooting themselves in the foot. You could have something so much better if you picked up the pace.
This script does not have to be 127 pages. But Fukunaga probably looked at the running time of Heat (2 hours and 50 minutes!) and said, “I’m going to do exactly what they did.”
By the way, quick funny Heat trivia: Al Pacino’s cop character in the movie is a coke-addict but they decided, after they shot the film, to cut that part of his character out. The problem was, Pacino’s entire persona was created as this coked-up insane cop. So anybody watching the movie is flat out confused why this cop is acting insane the whole movie for no reason!
After watching that last Acolyte episode, I have to have some consistent standards in the way I rate these things. That got a ‘wasn’t for me’ and this is so much better written than that. So it’s a ‘worth the read.’ It just needs to get its act together quicker!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: For a character’s dialogue, use the name they are called most often by everyone else. So if your character’s name is Eddie Boyle, and everybody calls him “Boyle,” don’t use “EDDIE” for his dialogue blocks. It’s confusing to the reader. This is why all of Eddie’s dialogue in this script is denoted by his last name, “BOYLE,” yet all of Ray Butler’s dialogue is denoted by his first name, “RAY.” Cause those are the names everybody calls them in the script. It can get confusing if nobody ever calls Boyle “Eddie,” yet all his dialogue blocks start as “EDDIE.” We’re like, “Who’s Eddie? Nobody ever says “Eddie” so who could he be?” And if you think we’re going to magically remember all first and last names that you introduce and therefore always be clear about who’s who, then you have never read a 128 page script with 30+ characters in it before.
What I learned 2: (MAJOR spoiler – don’t read if you plan to see the movie) If you want to attract those big movie stars who also consider themselves “serious” actors to your script (guys like Tom Hardy, Denzel Washington – not guys like Tom Cruise or Will Smith), kill them off in the end. Serious actors LOOOOOVE dying at the end of movies. I can almost guarantee that the second Tom Hardy read that Boyle died, he was in.
